Art is somehow separated from the world

 Art is somehow separated from the world

Gerhard Richter, Eight Student Nurses, 1966. Düsseldorf, Germany.

 

·         German Pop
o Series of 8 paintings
o Incorporating newspaper images
o Similar to Warhol's ideas
*Photographs taken from a yearbook of the nurse's school & their circumstance of death (forces a collective identity upon the women)

 

Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951. Paris, France.

 

·         Abstract Expressionism
o Kelly makes a painting that is not autonomous & is more centrifugal (moves away from center)
o Only the wall lets the composition exist (B/c they're all individual)
o Some of the paintings are white & the white wall is background
o The paintings want you to look at the wall behind it

 

Ad Reinhardt, Black Paintings, 1959-1967. New York

 

·         Abstract Expressionism
o Made about a hundred of these black paintings
o All the same size
o Consist of 9 squares of black paint & some have been tempered with blue/yellow/red/green pigment (primary pigments)
o Serial arrangement (Post-warhol world)

 

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Ascending. 1953. New York

 

·         Abstract Expressionism
o Most manmade shape
o Square is very important in abstract painting
o For the human perspective
Interaction of color is very important

 

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountain and Sea, 1952. New York

 

·         Post-painterly abstraction
o Interested in flatness & doesn't succumb to tenth st. touch
o Goes to a girl's school w/ all male faculty (Bennington College)
o Creates work that seems to respond to Jackson Pollock
o Unprimed, unsized canvas
o Pours paint on canvas and spreads it with her hands
o Calls it the "staining procedure"
o Paint becomes one w/ the canvas

 

Kenneth Noland, This, 1958-1959. New York.

 

·         (Deductive structure)
o No Impasto, Suggestion of procession, Deductive Structure
o Knows its center (Center of composition is the center of the canvas) → Circling it over & over
o Flatness → The white space between the circles shows it is canvas behind it
o Opticality: Suggests there might be projection but reminds you its actually flat → The white rings thin as they go towards center but then widen out again
o Demonstrates a connection with the picture

 

Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959. New York.

 

·         Deductive structure
o Clement Greenberg did NOT like Frank Stella. Greenberg thinks: There's no taste, Stella's deductive structure is boring/rule-bounding
o Die Fahne Hoch: "Up With the Flag"
o Takes brush the same size as the stretcher- Stripes fill out canvas completely
o Hints of blank canvas & pencils in where the lines should be
o Unusually large, Its clear where the center is
o The lines all start and end at the perimeter
o Size comes from the thickness of its frame (Everything on inside is dictated by the thing surrounding it)
o Influenced by Jasper Johns' stripes from Flag

 

Bridget Riley, Loss, 1964. England

 

·         *Op Art
*Part of an exhibition called "The Responsive Eye"
*Form of geometric abstraction, which was in a way impersonal and not obviously related to the real world

 

Robert Morris, Exhibition at the Green Gallery, 1965. New York.

 

·         Minimalism
o Uses the walls to incorporate the sculptures into the room
o You have to think of the object in relationship to the space
o Title of it changes depending on where it is placed in the room (Called cloud when its hanging, Slab when its on the floor)
o Sculpture is easier to be mistaken for an everyday object
o Uses no pedestal (Makes it seem like it is the pedestal)
o If it was smaller it'd be more precious, but it's more person-sized

 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964. New York

 

·         Minimalism
o Two steel plates & 4 sides of plexiglass
o Most caste bronze is hollow
o Fewer parts, more unified
o An object with an identity w/ only one specific feature
o Theres the sculpture & the air around it
o How do I percieve and object & how does it exist in real space?

 

 

Dan Flavin, The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham), 1963. New York.

 

·         Minimalism
*Room w/ 6 fluorescent tubes (Industrial material)
*Fixed idea of spatial relationship
*Dedicated to the Franciscan monk/philosopher, William of Ockham
*Art in a series
*Explaining things beyond the point where their understood is unnecessary (opt for the lowest number of variables)
*Simplicity is a governing principle
*There enough members of the set for you to extrapolate the formula, you know what the next object is going to be
*Relates to the space its in

 

Sol LeWitt, Open Cube Corner Piece, 1965. New York.

 

·         Conceptualism (the first object)
o White cube, attached at the wall in the corner
o What's important isn't the actual object, but the idea of the object
o Starts making objects that are on the verge of disappearing (cloud-like look), Simple shape
o For the senses only enough to get the idea across using a simple object

 

 

Art in series

 

·         If you create a collection of pieces of art that have a common theme
Examples:
*Richter painted his "Eight Student Nurses" in a series of 8 paintings (Similar to Warhol's ideas).
*Ellsworth Kelly painted "Colors for a Large Wall", which were individual painted panels, 64 Monochromes put together

 

Autonomy

 

·         Art is somehow separated from the world and different from other art objects (The job of the art object is not to be restrained)

 

Figure-ground relationship

 

·         the ____ is what you notice (distinct elements of focus) and the _____ is everything else (the landscape on which the figures rest).
*Some of the paintings are white & the white wall is background
*The paintings want you to look at the wall behind it

 

Interaction of Color

 

·         Josef Albers believed certain colors behaved certain ways. Gave his students paper to cut out to create the illusion of one (same) color being darker than the other, using different colors

 

Clement Greenberg

 

·         Most important critic of art of 20th century
Starts writing in late 1930s & most influential in 1960s
Art's job is protecting culture & good taste:
*Art is the defender of high culture
*Art must remain aloof from kitsch (Low-brow folksy taste)
*Taste is a crucial means by which art tests itself and is tested—it establishes art's cultural viability
*The best art is autonomous (separate category from the world), difficult and self-critical
*Self-critical art is medium specific
*The art that best satisfies these criteria is abstract painting

 

Opticality

 

·         When a painting recognizes it is an object meant for the eyes alone- borderline optical illusion
-doesn't appeal to touch
constant reference in aesthetics
-A malign element from which all Postmodern works try to escape

 

Deductive structure

 

·         *Compositional structure that derives from format of the picture
*Ex) Kenneth Noland, This: Knows its center (Center of composition is the center of the canvas) → Circling it over & over
*Ex) Demonstrates a connection with the picture (knows where the corners are)

 

Minimalism

 

·         *Sculptural movement about objects (Want to challenge notion of what counts as sculpture)
* Anything that is spare or stripped to its essentials

 

Op Art

 

·         Art that moves around as you look at it. Made for the eyes.

 

Lawrence Weiner, excerpt from Statements, 1968. New York

 

·         Conceptualism
o Only of descriptions of things that don't even get made
o Vandalist quality, with impassivity of art

 

John Baldessari, This is Not to be Looked At, 1968. LA, CA.

 

·         Conceptualism
*Text made by a proffessional sign maker
*Showing post-painterly abstraction
*Maybe the art isn't supposed to be for looking at
*You're looking at a painting of a magazine
*Saying don't look at Art Forum b/c of Clement Greenberg
*Its different to read it rather than just looking at it (the painting isn't for looking its for thinking)

 

Conceptualism

 

·         The idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

 

Document

 

·         A thing that testifies to the existence of the art object.
The artist would write down the idea of the art, and its your job to make it.

 

Richard Serra, Stacked Steel Slabs, 1969. New York

 

·         Post-Minimalism
*Loose piles of steel scrap, propped large slabs against or on top of them
*Compare to Donald Judd's Untitled: Just enough Slabs to make it tip, but not topple over (16 slabs compared to Judd's 10 slabs)

 

Robert Morris, Untitled. 1967. New York.

 

·         Post-minimalism
*Made of Felt
*Considerations of gravity become as important as those of space
*Deals w/ art work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form

 

Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1968-1969. New York.

 

·         Post-minimalism
*Critiquing minimalism
*Using industrial minimalism
*Hand-made weaving of tubes (Might have something to do with women/gender)
*Fuzziness of box made children want to play inside of it

 

 

Trio A

 

·         Yvonne Rainer is the choreographer that created the piece made up of a sequence of unpredictable movements that unfold in a continuous motion, deliberately opposing familiar dance patterns of development and climax. (Post-minimalist)

 

Post-minimalism

 

·         The artworks are usually everyday objects, use simple materials, and sometimes take on a "pure", formalist aesthetic

 

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1970, (1,500 ft by 30 ft) Nevada desert

 

·         Land Art
oName of painting= Grammatical error ("Don't Not")
o There are multiple absences (One function is erosion & the other is bulldozer)
o Artist's piece makes language become the absence of the object
o Language survives separate from the object
o When you buy the piece, you're buying the lack of the object

 

Robert Smithson, Monuments of the Passaic, 1967. New Jersey. (Published in Artforum, december 1967)

 

·         Land Art
o Artist (art critic) believes that thousands of years from now, people are going to try to understand our culture based on our monuments
o Interested in monumentalizing the way in which we make monuments relating to place in a way that is very powerful (They create the place)
o Creates pipe, bridge, fountain "monument"

 

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. New Jersey

 

·         Land Art
o Found a house in an economically decimated neighborhood (absence of employment, lack of opportunity)
oThe sculpture is an absence of the place
o Chainsaws the house in half

 

Hans Haacke, Shapolsky, Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, 1971. Installation at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC.

 

·         Land Art
o German artist who does research into the board of trustees at the Guggenheim: Exposes the properties and transactions of Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, which in 1971 represented the biggest concentration of real estate in New York
o Shapolsky buys up run-down properties, make minimal adjustments, raises the real estate price by selling it to people & back to himself (Shapolsky shell companies)
o How is a museum a site? How does a museum function as a place that has claims to cultural superiority?

 

Site-specific

 

·         Artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.
(Sculpture in ancient time periods was always made for a specific place, Made to adorn architecture & to mark a place)

 

Land Art

 

·         *Artists return to a relationship of space/place
*They cant be removed from where they are
*The sculpture is an absence of the place
*Needs to be bought by buying the land it was on (How do you know you own it? How do you show it to others)
*The canvas is very stable, b/c its far off from civilization & is hard to get to
*The inaccessibility becomes its allure & makes it problematic

 

Alison Knowles, #6. Shoes of Your Choice. 1963, New York

 

·         Fluxus
o Talking about why you're wearing that pair of shoes
o Thinking about objects in a way you wouldn't normally think about
o Performed in a fluxus concert

 

Joseph Beuys, Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare. 1965. Düsseldorf.

 

·         Fluxus
o Derive from mythological stories he had from WWII
o Chair wrapped in felt, foot splint roped on with iron = alchemy (turning iron or lead into gold)
o He anointed himself in honey (animal creativity, energy, nourishment)
o Holding a dead bunny & mutters whispers into his ear about artwork
o Believes he is able to convert iron into gold & oil into honey (You shouldn't have to explain a picture; it should just be absorbed like honey)

 

Helio Oiticica, Parangoles. 1967 and after. Rio de Janeiro.

 

·         Fluxus
o Artists see performance as connecting them to society, taking art outside, having an explosive effect on the world
o Performance using people who live in poverty, in Brazil
o Creates a sculpture that you wear, very colorful, something to work with as they dance
o People who are usually invisible become chromatically intense

 

Vito Acconci, Following Piece. 1969. New York.

 

·         Fluxus
o Consisted pictures of him following people
o Follows people until the person reaches a private place that he can't reach
o Duration of piece relies on person he's following
o Sadistic, masichistic play: He's the aggressor/stalker but is also passive (he has no choice but to keep following the person he chooses)
His works had a lot to do w/ endurance

 

Fluxus

 

·         -Persisting artistic international movement; focused primarily on performance
-an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They varied in performance, Neo-Dada noise music and visual art, urban planning, architecture, design, as well as literature.

 

Event scores

 

·         An everyday artification of everyday life, in relationship to music (Text on card/Performance)
-Part of fluxes movement

 

Viennese Action Theater

 

·         Gunter Brus self-paints himself as if performing self-mutilation. Performance as a ritual, cleansing, magical function. Walks through Vienna (Extremely conservative city) & freaks people out
-Short and violent movement in 20th-century art. It can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop "action art"